Why Trump Is Forcing Congress to Make His Iran Decision for Him

When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis told Donald Trump that they considered the 2015 Iran deal to be in America’s best interest, “He threw a fit,” The Washington Postreported this week. Trump, who publicly considers the Obama-era deal an “embarrassment,” campaigned under a promise to end the program and was in favor of scrapping it—in part because he feared that periodically recertifying the deal would make him look weak. As a Senate aide told the Daily Beast, “Trump doesn’t want to have to be embarrassed every 90 days.” To cushion the blow to his ego, Trump’s aides came up with a compromise: punt the decision of whether or not to withdraw from the agreement to Congress—a move that both keeps it in place and allows the president to save face by reinforcing the perception that he is against it.

The proposal, which the president will announce during a speech on Friday, will involve a delicate balancing act: the current agreement made by Barack Obama, requires the president to declare every 90 days that he or she is confident Tehran is in compliance with the agreement’s terms. Under advisement from former U.N. ambassador John Bolton and Fox News pundit Sean Hannity, who criticized him for going along with the deal when it was last up for recertification, Trump will announce that he won’t recertify the deal, but will not decertify it, either. Instead, he will ask Congress to establish “trigger points” that could immediately reimpose sanctions on Iran if they determine that Tehran has violated the agreement.

While this might seem like a simple stopgap measure, the compromise is once again the result of subtle maneuvering by Trump’s aides, who have learned to manage the president by making it appear he is in control. According to the Daily Beast, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster implied that his plan to save the deal was, essentially, to prevent the president from seeing it.

In his meeting with Senate Democrats, he implied that it would not be a bad development if they didn’t re-introduce sanctions on Iran even after Trump said the nuclear deal had been violated. Multiple sources familiar with the briefing said that McMaster made a point of never explicitly saying this, for fear that it would leak to the press that he was undermining the president’s preferred policy. . . . But as he attempted to massage his boss’s decision to decertify the deal, McMaster also made a plea to end these pressure point moments entirely.

“What he was also trying to tell us is that every 90 days this is going to be an issue if we don’t figure it out,” said the source. “His point is, this is always a thing that I have to deal with.”

Kicking the deal over to Congress is a strategy the president has employed repeatedly because it aligns with his dueling desires: to claim that he has kept his promises to his base, while washing his hands of any real decision-making responsibility. “He doesn’t want to certify the Iran deal for more domestic reasons than international ones,” Vali Nasr, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told the Post. “He doesn’t want to certify that any piece of the Obama strategy is working.”